A comparason between Native Title & Land Rights

a good comparison of what is land rights and what is the more insultingly and falsely called native title.

as gary foley and others have said for many years, ‘native title is not land rights’. it does not even come close to real land rights for the traditional owners of our ancient lands.

the major difficulties of comparing the two systems was that mainly it became very very difficult to explain the differences to those who had a limited legal knowledge and/or a more limited understanding of land for the traditional owners. there was a new-age primitivism that clouded many enquiring minds but that eventually brought many conversations to an inconclusive close.

the gove case 1972 and heard by j. blackburn found that land rights did not exist when it came to mining claims. then pm billy mcmahon strongly put to parliament that land rights would never exist, hence our tent embassy was formed. whitlam, not satisfied with that outcome then set up the woodward royal commission to look at land rights in the nt. his findings were given to whitlam but the cia-arranged dismissal of whitlam then allowed fraser, much to his credit, to bring the nt act in. john howard spoke quite strongly against the act being brought in but fraser, quite correctly, ignored his racist and rancid statements and proceeded. howard never forgave him and i believe howard’s later venal and personal actions led him to grab back the lands of the nt. among other reasons too, of course.

mabo 1992 found for the meriam torres strait islanders and this had a flow-on effect to the mainland land claims. then came the wik people win in 1996 that found that traditional land owners did not lose their lands to pastoralists and others. howard and his minions were now in power and they went ballistic with the high court decision. the coalition government decided then that the high court could no longer be trusted to continue to back the invaders as they had done so for nearly a hundred years. howard and tim fischer then came up with the infamous and racist 10 point plan to allow for, as they put it, ‘buckets of extinguishment’ against tha aboriginal traditional owners.

with some little change the bill made its way to the senate whereby, because of the then numbers, the final decision was to be made by senator brian harridine and he called on father frank brennan to assist him. two non-aboriginal men, steeped in white christianity, were charged with either rejecting the bill in toto or in attempting to amend the bill by cutting the bill off at its knees. we were calling for complete rejection but our voices would not be heard.

harridine and brennan decided to not consult with those aborigines, including noel pearson who referred to the coalition government as ‘racist scum’, because they did not want a ‘racist election.’ the 10 point plan became the 6 point plan to stop racist elections! these two men have cost aborigines dearly since those days and they continue still to do so. what they did not seem to understand is that for my people, every bloody election is a racist event. especially in the rural areas where land claims are before the tribunal.

governments around the country listened and learned well on how to win on every land claim that came before them, and that was to keep the cases out of the courts and set up negotiating bodies that they could quite easily control. real land rights has been reduced to indigenous land use agreements that now only allow for negotiated agreements that only allows for cultural access but with no ownership of the land or its resources.

we badly need to return to the land rights as a proper human rights procedure. the krudd and gillard governments are more than prepared to continue to steal our birthrights from us. the yorta yorta land claim was naught but a travesty of justice, as so many others have also been. the court found against their cultural continuance on their lands, a complete travesty of natural justice, and then the victorian government of the time recognised enough of their cultural continuance to do a negotiated theft of their lands.

strane thing, white justice. we are never ever allowed to win.

we want rights, not some smoke-and-mirrors theft of what is ours and has been gor more than 60 000 years.